The original title of this book, which was compiled from a series of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in October, 1884 by Mgr. Dillon, was The War of Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization. The author wrote it "in order to do his part in carrying out the instruction given by the Sovereign Pontiff in the Encyclical Humanum Genus when he called upon the pastors of souls, to whom it was addressed, to 'instruct the people as to the artifices used by societies of this kind in seducing men and enticing them into their ranks, and as to the depravity of their opinions and the wickedness of their acts'. Mgr. Dillon's work has already been honoured by the Holy Father himself with so marked and so unusual an approbation that there is no need for us to accord it any further praise than merely to take note of the fact. The book was presented to His Holiness, accompanied by an Italian version of its table of contents, and of long extracts from its principal sections, and Leo XIII was pleased to order that the Italian version should be completed, and the book printed and published at Rome at his own expense." (The Month, Sept. 1885). Despite the fact that the lectures were delivered by a Catholic prelate to an audience composed mainly of members of his own faith, we feel that the subject of international political skullduggery is one which cannot fail to interest Catholic and non-Catholic alike, the more so indeed since events in the course of the decades following the original publication of this book have confirmed the lecturer's thesis. The last four editions have appeared under the title of Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked. Mgr. Dillon does not speak explicitly of the two currents of thought and action proceeding from the Masonic French Revolution, namely, the current of Rousseauist-LockianMasonic Liberalism and the current of Socialism and Communism. Implicitly, however, he does so when, on the one hand, he foreshadows the United States of Europe and World Federalism and, on the other, quotes the infamous Declaration of the International in 1868. This Declaration, formulated at the International Congress held at Geneva in 1868 and quoted by Mgr. Dillon in his preface, is well worth reproducing, at least in part. It runs as follows: "The object of the International Association of Workmen, as of every other Socialist Association, is to do away with the parasite and the pariah. Now what parasite can be compared to the priest. "God and Christ, these citizen-Providences, have been at all times the armour of Capital and the most sanguinary enemies of the working classes. It is owing to God and to Christ that we remain to this day in slavery. It is by deluding us with lying hopes that the priests have caused us to accept all the sufferings of this earth. It is only after sweeping away all religion, and after tearing up even to the last roots every religious idea that we can arrive at our political and social ideal. "Down, then, with God and with Christ Down with the despots of heaven and earth Death to the priests Such is the motto of our grand crusade." In a note on page 20 of the original edition Mgr. Dillon returned to the question of the direction of Freemasonry, which he had mentioned in his preface. He there says: "The Jewish connection with modern Freemasonry is an established fact everywhere manifested in its history. The Jewish formulas employed by Freemasonry, the Jewish traditions which run through its ceremonial, point to a Jewish origin, or to the work of Jewish contrivers .... Who knows but behind the Atheism and desire of gain which impels them to urge on Christians to persecute the Church and destroy it, there lies a hidden hope to reconstruct their Temple, and in the darkest depths of secret society plotting there lurks a deeper society still which looks to a return to the land of Judah and to the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem?"

Italy is still preeminently a land of faith and fervour. Invasions, secret societies, revolutions, and persecutions have done their worst to make it otherwise during the past hundred years. Writers of books of travel, newspaper correspondents, and others who cater for the prevailing anti-Catholic prejudices of the majority of those who speak the English language, generally represent it as having grown at least indifferent, if not worse, under these trials. But the truth is that at no past period of its Christian history were the mass of the inhabitants of the country more attached to their religion, more firmly fixed in its principles, or more devoted to its practices than at the present moment. The writer of the following pages upon one of the most beautiful and useful manifestations of the faith of Italy, has had ample opportunity of witnessing what he here asserts. He visited that country for the first time early in the spring of the past year; and he confesses, he was prepared to see everywhere a great decay of religion in a nation where the Church had been universally plundered, where the Supreme Pontiff was dethroned and imprisoned, where the religious orders were suppressed, where the public observance of the Lord's Day and of many Christian practices had been legally abolished, where the recognition of Catholicity by the State was made a cruel farce, and where, in fine, the most formidable atheism the world has ever seen was, with supreme political power in its hands, astutely planning the eradication of Christianity from the social, political, and even individual life of the people.